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Alibaba breaks record in Singles Day campaign, boosted by shopping via mobile devices

By Ding Yining | November 11, 2014, Tuesday | Online Edition

MASSIVE transactions through mobile phones and tablets on Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao on this year’s Singles Day sales campaign signals the advent of the mobile shopping era, with more and more shoppers picking up their smartphones to search and shop for products they desire.

It took only 13 and a half hours for transaction volume on Alibaba’s platforms to surpass last year’s record of 36.2 billion yuan(US$5.88 billion), and 13 vendors have recorded transaction volume of 100 million yuan.

Transactions exceeded 10 billion yuan within 38 minutes after midnight, and 45.5 percent of those came from mobile devices.

By 7:36 am, transactions through mobile devices surpassed 10 billion yuan, more than double from last year.

Tmall President Wang Yulei said he expects mobile channels to contribute about 45 or 50 percent of total transactions after the 24-hour campaign wraps up.

“Mobile shopping has a big potential to grow in the future when we take into consideration the huge amount of smartphone users in China, and it offers opportunities for vendors from both online and offline channels to better connect with consumers,” said Jason Yu, general manager at Kantar Worldpanel China.

“It’s a very natural for online shoppers to become more accustomed to browsing and shopping through smart devices using their commuting time,” he added.

Starting this October, mobile traffic almost doubled that of desktop computers for promotional pages at Taobao and Tmall, while they only made up about 20 percent of total traffic last year.

During the peak hours, Alibaba’s payment unit Alipay handles 2.85 million payments in one minute, more than triple that of a year ago.

Alibaba is also driving sales in overseas markets after it completed a massive initial public offering in September.

Hong Kong, US, Taiwan, Australia and Canada are among the top countries or regions for exported products in terms of gross merchandise volume.

Nearly 27,000 vendors are participating in this year’s shopping event, with more than 42,000 brands offering discounts up to 70 percent.

At the same time, the rivalry between Alibaba Group and Tencent also continues in the e-commerce sector with Tencent trying to leverage its massive popular online chatting tool WeChat to drive online sales especially for small-sized individual vendors.

As of 10 am today, the number of orders at JD.com increased 1.4 times from the same period a year ago and orders placed through mobile devices tripled.

Offline retailers are also eager to catch up in the online frenzy as 28 department stores also joined hands with Taobao to allow consumers to place order through smartphones and receive coupons for restaurants or teahouses.

At Shanghai-based Yihaodian.com, where US retailer Walmart holds a majority stake, transaction volume added 9 times a week ago as of 11am today.

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